The-Rebellion-of-1857-Streets

for forbidden women—had unmanned them, and placed them outside the
boundaries of masculine honor. Moreover, their decision to operate outside these
rules of conduct absolved the British from addressing their grievances or from
showing them mercy. A poem in the Anglo-Indian Delhi Gazette put it plainly
when it cried, "No mercy's shown to men whose hands/ With women's blood yet
reek!"[73]
That rebel sepoys would commit such unspeakable crimes against women was
attributed both to racial characteristics and to religion. In India, the conflict had
hardened racial hatreds among British officers long before Kanpur.
Correspondence reveals widespread use of the word ‘nigger’ and other racially
antagonistic language when referring to natives, and officers writing home
frequently echoed the contention that "[t]he race of men in India are certainly the
most abominable, degraded lot of brutes that you can imagine, they don't seem to
have a single good quality."[74] In the British and Anglo-Indian media, such
language received almost unqualified sanction in the wake of Kanpur. Despite
the fact that a majority of high-caste Bengal army sepoys were traditionally
recruited for their tall physiques and light skin, British sources depicted "gangs
of black satyrs" raping and dismembering British women, and called rebel
Indians "that venom race," "in heart as black as face."[75]
These ‘black’ villains were also believed to be depraved because of their
religion, whether Hindu or Muslim, for in both cases religion was presumed to
have encouraged the rape and murder of British women. Rumors circulated that
some of the women at Kanpur were raped, kidnapped, and forced to convert to
Islam.[76] High-caste Brahmins were said to be slaves to the requirements of
caste, which supposedly included debased notions of masculine honor. Shortly
after Kanpur, the Delhi Gazette bellowed:
We shall never again occupy a high ground in India until we have put a yoke
upon the Brahmins. We have conceded too much to the insolence of caste. Not
one high caste man should henceforward be entrusted with a sword.... He has
been trusted with power, and how has he betrayed it? The graves of 100 English
women and children—worse, the unburied bones of those poor victims—are the
monuments of high bred sepoy chivalry.[77]
By their crimes at Kanpur, then, both Hindu and Muslim sepoys had given up all
claims to manliness, to honor, to bravery, and to chivalry. Moreover, both their
‘race’ and their religion were increasingly called upon to explain the loss of those
claims.
The effects of such narrative constructions were not merely textual—instead,
they had real effects in the material world. Perhaps most importantly, they
legitimated acts of appalling vengeance by British forces. At the same time,
however, British control over these narratives either glossed or completely
ignored the extent of British acts of brutality against Indian soldiers and civilians.
As one of the conflict’s most influential historians put it in 1864, the Rebellion
had been fought by "English heroes" who, in the end, "marched triumphantly to
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